LOS ANGELES — A set of watercolors by two-year-old Micah Zuri Davis-O’Connor is one of the first works to greet viewers as they enter the south gallery of the California African American Museum (CAAM). The paintings are abstract, carefree, and bursting with color; they immediately conjure a toddler splayed on the floor, exploring the distinct human pleasure of controlling limbs to create images. Davis-O’Connor was born in 2022 in Altadena, one of the first bastions for Black middle-class families in the Los Angeles area and home to many lauded artists and entertainers. These paintings were made the year before his neighborhood would be ravaged by a fire that left little in its wake. CAAM’s group exhibition, Ode to ‘Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena, curated by Dominique Clayton, acts as both an exercise in reverence and a declaration of resilience for Altadena’s artistic community. Starting with Davis-O’Connor’s paintings sparks a sense of innocence and prompts the questions: “What will he do next? What will he become?” It’s a way of not only thinking about the future, but believing in one.
The show has a dual thesis: It acknowledges the difficult, racist circumstances that were overcome to create this community, and it highlights the depth of talent that the city borders still nurture. The roster features a collection of 25 intergenerational, multimedia artists who are connected by Altadena — some who have passed on and many who have lost their homes, studios, and/or life’s work to this year’s blaze. A chilling assemblage of the Black civil rights struggle by John Outterbridge (“REVIEW/54-Outhouse,” 2003) stands near Marcus Leslie Singleton’s oil painting “Monk, Closing Act” (2025), which looks toward a charred quartz sound bowl from musician and artist Grandfather — the only item recovered from the burn site of his home. HRDWRKER’s eponymous video work, commissioned by CAAM for the exhibition, depicts various artists ruminating independently and together about Altadena’s legacy and how it feeds their practice.
Some literal lineages are found in the gallery space. Mother and daughter Betye and Alison Saar are represented with a collaborative mixed-media installation (“House of Gris Gris,” 1989). Keni “Arts” Davis has numerous watercolors, many made after the fire to commemorate locations that were lost (“Beauty from the Ashes,” 2018–25). Mildred “Peggy” Davis, an active member of the Alta/Pas quilt circle and wife to Keni, has two quilts in the show. Mildred and Keni’s daughter, the well-known artist Kenturah Davis (mother to Davis-O’Connor), is exhibiting two works as well. One combines weaving with her signature text/drawing compositions, but it also includes a wooden vessel turned from a tree at her home that no longer exists. It’s one of the few pieces that she and her parents were able to salvage.
The combination of location-specific artworks and generational references drives home the fact that Altadena is a real place that contains real lives. The show as a whole emphasizes the necessity of collective memory, not only in the presentation of artifacts, but in the act of making Altadena’s Black legacies experiential. Every visitor becomes an extension of the memory of those places, those pieces, those people. Read the wall texts, hold the story.
The show helps reframe art as more than an exercise in human creativity, empathy, and expression. Art is evidence. Art is documentation of an existence that resonates and ripples beyond the confines of one’s own life, that breathes life into those of others, into humans’ ways of being and of being seen. This is not a requiem for Altadena. It’s an ode to Altadena. A poem of praise for a place — a bedrock for thousands of lives — that still exists. It deserves our care and protection.
Ode to ‘Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena continues at California African American Museum (600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles) through October 12. The exhibition was curated by Dominique Clayton in community with Larry Earl, Kenturah Davis, Arianne Edmonds, Dylan Joyner, and V. Joy Simmons, MD.
